How Unequal Are We? Redistribution of Wealth to the Rich

Too bad you couldn't have been so "lucky" so predict a certain sector of Wall Street would increase in value (after that bail out)! Wish I could
get paid big bucks for such amazing analysis! haha.

I knew, as i'm sure GreenBicMan knew as well, that Health Insurance stocks would go up when HCR was signed into law. If I had money to buy stocks,
could have made some money.

Of course, this shouldn't of happened because it's socialism LOL!!! The health insurance industry dealt with Obama and demanded that ALL AMERICANS
have to buy into health insurance. It was the only way he could do it. Big Pharma also made a deal.

Obama didn't even write the frickin bill. The main draft came from a former VP of Wellpoint. But yep, let
s call it SOCIALISM because it's cool and trendy!!!!

Morons. I made numerous threads about all of it and people ignored it. I honestly think Obama went ahead with the deal as it was probably the only
way he could get any kind of HCR. He simply couldn't have gone up against the health insurance industry and big pharma at the same time. The
rhetoric against him would have been 10 fold what it ended up being.

You will also notice the Republican's SILENCE on criticizing both industries. Can't attack big corporations now can they? They need the campaign
funds for the coming elections.

I REPEAT...the HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY LOBBIED FOR MANDATES.

Excellent documentary here...which no one looked at...which goes through the entire health care drama....without the spin.

The numbers don't mean anything. I just can't understand this concept of "fairness". What is fair, who decides what is fair and how does
"fair" get implemented?

Is it fair that someone should have to pay taxes that go to pay for some gent to sit home and watch TV? Is it fair to have a business owner's
income taxed when he receives it and then have the government take a ton of it when he dies to pay for the same joker?

If everyone's wealth was confiscated and everyone got the same money, is that fair? Is it fair that the top 1% of folks in this country pay 40% of
the taxes?

Is it fair that a person in a trade who works hard can not afford a decent house, send his kids to a decent school, take a family vacation and be able
to put a little money away for his retirement? Yes it is "fair". Is it a serious problem? Yes. Is it something that we should do what ever we
need to do to solve? Yes. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

We should get off of the fairness business because it makes no sense. We need to worry about the quality of life folks have and how to make that
better, regardless of how much cash folks have.

"poor" people in the US on average have two TVs, cable a car, a computer and a roof over their heads. They get free medical, subsidized housing
and utilities, free education, not to mention things like parks, librarys and the rest of it.

The problem we have is that we seem unable to be able to provide a quality of life for many of our citizens despite the massive amount of money that
we spend in social programs. In many of these cases it is not the fault of the rich. Rich folks did not trash public housing. Rich folks did not
make it such that parks and schools are war zones. The rich did not create a situation where 7 out of 10 black kids in this country are born into
single parent homes. The rich folks did not cause any of these problems.

Face it - we have a growing number of totally dysfunctional people in this society who will not educate themselves, abuse drugs and alcohol, engage in
risky sexual activity and have children they can not afford to have and raise them poorly. The funny thing is that these folks have well financed
pressure groups with stooges like Sharpton who pound the table asking for "more". If you attempt to even discuss these problems you're a heartless
bastard, a racist or just about any other ist you can think of. When this group gets larger they expand geographically. They move their
dysfunctional lives into neighborhoods that previously did not have that kind of dysfunction. What happens is that the schools in that neighborhood
decline, the crime goes up and the tradesman has to move to a more expensive neighborhood where he is on the financial wire. One blip and his life
is in the tank.

Trace the problem to its core and it is not that he could not afford the house when he had a period of unemployment. The core problem is that the
dysfunction grew and took over a perfectly nice neighborhood and he had to leave.

We also have a culture that is driven by the media where everyone feels that they should have everything anyone else has. There was actually a gal
testifying in front of congress last week claiming that her not having broadband in house was a form of neglect. She is claiming this and her son is
going to UNC on a full ride. How was the gent disadvantaged so much that we was able to get into a tier 1 college? Congressmen were actually
talking about paying for broadband for poor folks. How did we get to this place where everyone thinks they are owed what most folks have had to work
to get?

Lets stop worrying about how much certain folks have and how little other folks have and focus on what we need to do to clean up the problems we have
- and those problems are not due to the fact that a few folks have a ton of dough.

Of course, the challenge with the current approach to dealing with this problem is to tax, tax, tax. We don't have the guts to deal with the
underlying problems that left unaddressed will continue to fester.

I also never got hired or was given a raise by a poor person.

These are complex problems that require serious discussion and some very heavy lifting to solve. Railing about "rich" folks, most of which are
small business owners does not do anything but make some folks feel good. If it makes you feel good, by all means, keep doing it. Don't kid
yourself that you are proposing anything that will have even a marginal impact on the problems in this country.

The point you are making is this:-

The rich has paid most of the nation's taxes. They can wipe their backsides clean. Anything happens to those taxed money that had not been possible
to evade is the govt's fault.

That's where the fallacy lies.

1. Where did those money that the rich obtain to pay such amounts for taxes comes from? It came from the common worker.

2. Taxes are only a small portion of their wealth. There is still a LARGE and significant obscene amount that they hold back kept under lock in banks
or casino stock market funds, or just plain frivolous spending such as the likes of Paris Hilton.

Is it conscionable for one person to hold that amount of wealth? Or should he re-distribute such obscene amounts back to his workers who helped him
grow in weath, and let them afford a better life?

That is the critical point you must addressed, or to continue in this current manner distribution of wealth, we as a human race will ultimately face
doom as both the rich and the poor will only kill one another in the end.

The problem isn't the rich, it is income taxation, which maybe the rich conspired to have thrust upon the people of The United States, but that
income taxation is the problem should be clear. Income taxation has not just unfairly robbed ordinary working class people of needed money, those
taxes have been used to expand the federal government, and state governments to the point we are today. Even the vaunted Ronald Regan, famous for his
anti big government rhetoric, expanded government. Regan paid lip service to conservative ideology while all the while adding to the expansion of
government.

This expansion of government has made it improbable for many to save their money and invest in their own futures, and has created a sort of serfdom
that is not good for anybody, including the rich. Aristotle, all those years ago, in his analysis of Politics, reduced the cycles of revolution, (I
know the department of redundancy department), down to the have's and have not's. What Aristotle said was that when the gap between the haves and
have not's becomes so great the have not's can no longer survive then they revolt, and a form of wealth re-distribution takes place, pacifying the
have not's until they grow apathetic, while the have's gradually regain their wealth, and this cycle continues over and over and over...

The arguments I always hear in favor of income taxation are that without them we could never have the "important government services so necessary"
to the public. Of course, with the exception of a brief income tax passed to pay for the Civil War and repealed after the funds were raised, the
United States federal and state governments managed to act as a government without income taxation for roughly 130 years. Hell, when the Colonists
revolted against England, there was no such thing as income taxation, and those guys declared war over a tax on tea! Times have certainly changed.

If the currency in the U.S. was a stable one backed by something of intrinsic value and there was no income taxation, the poor would have a much
easier time climbing out of that predicament and into a more comfortable one. There are no stories of the welfare recipient that used that
"necessary government service" to rise out of poverty. The multitude of licensing schemes, and regulations placed upon the market place favor the
rich and certainly not the poor. Even so, that great American Dream can, in many ways, be seen in the crafty ways immigrants will ignore licensing
schemes and intrusive regulations and just market their wares on the public sidewalks of where they reside. Of course, they will be periodically
harassed and even arrested by the police, but usually they are back out selling their wares the very next day.

Not just immigrants, on a personal note, I was fortunate enough to know a man affectionately called "5th Street Dick" because he was a homeless man
who took a shopping cart and bought a large coffee container and would walk up and down 5th Street selling his coffee. After several years of this
sort of enterprise, he managed to not just get a home, but open his own coffee house, called...you guessed it, 5th Street Dick's. Dick, tragically
died of throat cancer several years ago, but his legendary coffee house with some of the best jazz in L.A., remains open to this day.

When wandering up and down 5th Street, Dick did not apply for any license to do so, nor did he comply with any local, state or federal regulations, he
just sold coffee to anyone who wanted a cup. Good coffee, imported from Africa, that was his gig, bringing African coffee to Americans, and he
remains, in my view, a hero and a true Captain of Industry, who overcame his problems and rose to prominence, in spite of the intrusions government
would have liked to impose upon him, simply because he wanted a better life.

Right -- this is good but the only problem is you mention the income tax during the Civil War only that income tax wasn't enough! So Abraham Lincoln
got into trouble with the banks as the excellent documentary Money Masters details:

I'm suggesting that the numbers themselves are not important. Were I to choose a number that I find more objectionable it would be the tax number
and not the income disparity.

The income disparity has nothing to do with this problem. You can take all of the money from the top 1% and dole it out and the problem will be
fixed for a time, but then will be back and much worse because the very folks who currently have wealth have it because they know how to create it and
take all of their money and they will either opt out or leave the country.

When you have close to 50% of the people in the country paying no income taxes you have a real problem. That problem is that there are too many
folks with a stake in the governance of the country. That is one of the problems we have today.

Well a lot of the problem also comes from our trade laws. Since our tariffs are incredibly low (average 2-3 percent), there is no incentive for
people to stay if taxes are raised in other areas. There was a time when half of all Federal income was from TARIFFS. Tariffs are the only thing
that protects individual economies. It protects wages, jobs, benefits, small businesses. Our trade laws have been largely destructive to our entire
country and every President since Reagan, including BOTH parties, have contributed to this.

We simply have to raise tariffs. Any kind of VAT tax, without tariffs to offset it, will wipe out what is left for economy. Making small businesses
even more uncompetitive with transnational corporations would be economic suicide.

The bottom line is that the wealthiest are gonna have to pay up. It's gotta happen or the whole country is toast. There is no way around it. But
tariffs absolutely have to be raised.

We are the largest consumer in the world. Everything we buy is made somewhere else. If we start tacking tariffs on goods, it will increase prices on
foreign goods, give small businesses a fighting chance to compete and create REAL jobs, and also be a potentially huge tax revenue to help offset our
deficit.

Yes it's going to inflate prices, but it's going to happen anyway if we do nothing.

This also goes back to the Civil War -- the industrial North used tariffs because at first England made value-added industrial production ILLEGAL in
their colony -- and so the tariffs were raised as the typical

"import substitution" policy.

But then England stopped buying products from the Southern states in retaliation against the tariffs for English manufactured goods.

And so the North could develop against England but the South could not sell their slave-based commodities.

And that was the real reason for the civil war -- not slavery on its own.

They already left the country. Their factories are in China, vietnam, and taiwan. (their factories, and YOUR jobs)

They have headquarters in the Cayman Islands, and the netherlands Antilles.

They pay 15% taxes, because their incomes are derived from capital gains, unlike virtually every other working class middle american.

They also own the media, all the major news shows, newspapers, and magazines. They control public thought and discourse through their media.

They've atomized American families (which means you don't go out, you don't know anybody, you get your information (propaganda) from their media,
and you don't know any better because you don't talk to anyone else.) Fun fact: The average American has .9 best friends...

We're not far off from a third world sort of picture.. As long as propaganda works on the masses, things will continue to get worse (but people wont
know why/what to do about it; they will almost surely end up making it worse in an attempt to make it better.)

This subject is always argued the same way using income tax statistics. The problem is that income taxes, actually taxes in general, are only one
piece of this puzzle. To figure out who pays most you need to look at other factors. Always excluded from this are government spending and government
transfers. Where your tax dollars are being spent matters. How they can be reclaimed matters. What matters is where and to whom government spends tax
dollars back. The top earners pay more income taxes, but also benefit most from transfers.

Wow its cool to see that most people here actually "get it" to some extent. Whats a little concerning is that some people still believe there is no
class war except that being waged by the poor half of the country. And they say things like "its not the fault of the wealthy that black men end up in
jail and therefore don`t father their children or that poor people treat their low income housing like crap so it falls apart. I`m caucasian, and even
I know that there has been a campaign against the minority groups of this country and it`s been going on since before this country was born. Being
white doesn`t save you, once your poor, your just "one of them". It kinda proves the point against racism. Any person in unfortunate circumstances can
end up as a poor person. That`s right! It should be obvious since there are rich black people that there is not some kind of problem with black people
that they cannot be successful. It`s true that more doors are opebn today for most minority groups but I still see a lot of spite. It`s like the white
man said,"ok you can be free but we are going to act so jealous and pissed off about it that you are gonna wish we would go back to how things were.
At least then you were working and living in my nice house and everybody got fed and you all slept underunder a roof with no worries about how to
make it through the next month."
I think that instead of abolishing slavery they just created that illusion but really just made everybody slaves so we couldn`t tell the
difference because we would all be created and treated "equal". What they seemewd to have done was created a "free-range slavery" system. And they
placed us all into a new deal where the former position of slave was combined with the former position of a common poor yet "free" person and combined
these two into one position, the "free range slave". We are all like free range chickens. We can wander around and choose our own path, but they all
lead to the same place: a job which accomplishes two things. Cheap labor and the "in-cum" taxes deducted from your already laughable "paycheck" going
straight onto their pockets. It`s like a carnival game; the only way to win is to cheat. Get caught cheating and pay the price. They cheat and get
away with it because they were smart enough to cover eachother`s asses. People living check to check are so desperate for an extra crumb here and
there that they rat eachother out for a $100 bill. Read my recent post today on the mason thread about my idea on the dynamics of power and why we
don`t have any.

Forget about the War on Terror, forget about Healthcare, forget about climate change, forget about the birth certificate or Tea parties......

THIS topic should be stickied to the front page indefinitely imo.

Most everything else is distraction of exactly THIS core problem.
And this problem is the same in every country, from Saudi-Arabia to Holland to the UK.

The solution is not something people are eager to discuss: a complete overhaul of our Laws and Regulations regarding private property of resources
(land, mines, trees, animals) and means of production (factories, tools, machines, power plants, etc). (My thread on solutions is the 1st link in my
sig.)

People will scream "Commie" or "Maoist" waaaay before they can even imagine a drasticly different world where we all have equal access to the
basics of human rights: food, shelter, clothing, healthcare.

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